Increasing the affairs of individuals and enterprises are being conducted in an automated manner over the Internet. Enterprises now engage in selling their products and services over the Internet; individuals also engage in communicating with one another over the Internet; employees may also engage in accessing secure resources of their employers over the Internet, etc.
One ever present and daunting issue with this activity is Internet security. Some transactions may be innocuous and may not require any substantial security. However, a growing number of transactions do involve sensitive material associated with enterprises and individuals, such as corporate secrets, personal data, etc. A variety of security mechanisms exist to address this issue.
For example, some enterprises may install dedicated connections for secure communications between parties. Yet, this approach is less pervasive with the advent of Virtual Private Network (VPN) techniques. A VPN permits an insecure connection to be used to achieve secure communications between parties engaged in a transaction.
VPN transactions use authentication and encryption techniques for purposes of ensuring that communications are secure. Essentially, a VPN permits insecure communications lines to be used in a secure manner.
Furthermore, there can be different modes of access for a VPN. For example, limited capabilities may require less authentication of a user than full capabilities would require. When a user is accessing a VPN via a limited capability mode and then desires to switch to a more robust full capability mode, the user has to terminate the VPN session and manually initiate a second VPN session. This is inconvenient and time consuming.
Consequently, there is a need for improved techniques for transparently switching between different modes of a VPN.